Eight civilian members of an auxiliary force in Burkina Faso’s anti-jihadist campaign were killed in an ambush on Wednesday, like reported by africa.cgtn.com.

A security source says the attack happened in the Gorgadji area in north Burkina Faso.  A patrol of the VDP (Volunteers for the Defence of the Motherland) was targeted. In addition to the eight confirmed fatalities, several others are missing.

Islamists attacked the northeast Nigerian border town of Damasak, killing at least eight people and causing hundreds to flee to neighbouring Niger, local officials and a resident said on Wednesday according to reuters.com.

No group claimed responsibility but militant Islamist group Boko Haram and its offshoot, Islamic State West Africa Province, carry out attacks in the northeast.

Some 2 million people have fled their homes and 30,000 have been killed since Boko Haram launched its insurgency in 2009 aimed at creating an Islamic state in the region.

Nigeria, which has Africa’s biggest economy, faces a raft of security challenges. Authorities are grappling with the insurgency, a spate of school kidnappings in the northwest and piracy in the Gulf of Guinea.

The insurgents attacked Damasak, a few kilometres from the border with Niger, at around 5 p.m. on Tuesday, three soldiers speaking on condition of anonymity said.

“Ten residents were killed in attacks on Tuesday. Our people have fled to villages in Niger while some are trapped in the bush,” local government official Bukar Mustapha told Reuters on Wednesday. “Boko Haram men are still at Damasak,” he said.

Resident Mustapha Gashigar said eight people had been buried but other bodies had not been recovered, and 17 were seriously injured. He said hundreds of people had fled Damasak.

Two local government officials, who did not want to be named, said the insurgents shot sporadically with anti-aircraft guns mounted on vehicles.

A military spokesman did not immediately respond to phone calls seeking comment. A Borno state government spokesman did not respond to text messages and phone calls seeking comment.

Damasak was captured by Boko Haram in late 2014 but freed by troops from Nigeria and neighbouring states early the following year.

Boko Haram attained global notoriety for the kidnap of 270 girls from a school in the northeastern town of Chibok in 2014. Around 100 of the schoolgirls have never been found.

Wednesday marked the seventh anniversary of the mass abduction. Borno State Governor Babagana Umara Zulum said in a statement he had not lost hope that those who were sill missing would return safely.

A minibus traveling outside Mogadishu, Somalia was blown up, killing at least 15 people and wounding four others, like reported by africa.cgtn.com.

The Somali Federal Government says the minibus exploded seconds after rolling over an improvised explosive device.

No one has yet claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s incident, however, the government said al Shabab is behind the attack incident.

Mohamed Ibrahim Moalimuu Spokesperson of the Federal Government of Somalia & Senior Media Adviser to the Prime Minister tweeted saying, “A heinous incident, a minibus which left Mogadishu this morning to Jowhar with civilian passengers was blown up by Al-Shabaab btw Balad district & Qalimoow around 50 KM north to Mogadishu. 15 innocent people were killed. This act is an indication to how ruthless terrorists are.”

According to police sources, the minibus could have been collateral damage, while the real objective of the jihadists would have been to attack the government convoys that patrolled the road.

The terror group is responsible for dozens of attacks in Somalia, including a 2017 car bomb attack in Mogadishu that killed some 300 people.

The Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate has fallen, its fighters have dispersed and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has been killed. But two years after it suffered stinging defeats in Syria and Iraq, the terrorist group has found a new lifeline in Africa, where analysts say it has forged alliances with local militant groups in symbiotic relationships that have pumped up their profiles, fund-raising and recruitment, like reported by nytimes.com.

Many of those homegrown insurgencies are only loosely connected to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. Still, over the past year, as violence from Islamist extremists on the African continent reached a record high, the Islamic State has trumpeted these battlefield wins to project an image of strength and inspire its supporters worldwide.

Most recently, the Islamic State claimed credit last week for a days-long rampage in war-afflicted northern Mozambique, where militants with distant ties to the terrorist organization attacked a key port town. The attack left dozens of people dead, including at least one South African and one British citizen, and set off talk on the Islamic State’s online forums of the establishment of a new caliphate there, according to researchers.

“As an organization more broadly, ISIS is hurting,” said Colin P. Clarke, a counterterrorism analyst at the Soufan Group, a New York-based security consulting firm. “To improve morale among its supporters, its leadership is seeking to elevate regional branches showing the most promise in launching attacks and maintaining a robust operational tempo.”

The siege on Palma, the town in Mozambique, was the most brazen attack yet by the local insurgency and is part of an alarming rise of brutal clashes involving militant Islamist extremists across the continent. Violence associated with those groups spiked 43 percent in 2020 compared with 2019, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a U.S. Defense Department research institution.

In recent days, tens of thousands of people who fled the assault in Mozambique have arrived in neighboring provinces and described scenes of devastating violence from the bloody ambush.

Ricardo Elias Dário, who worked in the gas-rich port town as a heavy-equipment operator, could hear the gunfire from inside his red-clay home. Within seconds he grabbed his black leather jacket and sprinted with a friend, Benefica Taou, toward the nearby bush to take cover.

But as they fled, his friend was fatally struck by a stray bullet, he said, and fell to the ground. Mr. Dário barely made it.

“They were shooting everywhere, shooting everyone, even the dogs,” Mr. Dário, 35, said Thursday in a phone interview from Mozambique. “I was just running, thinking, ‘Maybe I will survive, maybe I won’t survive, but at least if I run maybe I will survive.’”

For over a decade, American military and counterterrorism officials have warned that Africa was poised to become the next frontier for international terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and more recently the Islamic State. Both organizations have forged alliances with local jihadist groups in recent years and established new strongholds in West, North and Central Africa from which they can carry out large-scale attacks, according to experts and officials in the United States and Europe.

More recently, American officials have warned that even in its weakened condition, the Islamic State remains a cohesive organization in its former strongholds in Iraq and Syria, with perhaps 10,000 fighters who have gone underground.

While battlefield defeats and the coronavirus have dented its vaunted online propaganda and recruiting operations, the Islamic State still has a war chest of $100 million and a global network of cells outside the Middle East, from the Philippines to Afghanistan, according to American and United Nations counterterrorism officials.

Iraqi security forces and their Western allies continue to hunt down pockets of fighters. Over two weeks in March, Iraqi security forces backed by American and British warplanes conducted 312 airstrikes against Islamic State strongholds, in one of the largest operations against the insurgents since 2019.

Even as political leaders in Europe and the United States grapple with a new threat of domestic terrorism — from right-wing extremists and white supremacists — the fear of a suicide attack in a Western city by a lone individual inspired by the Islamic State’s ideology lurks just beneath the surface.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and foreign ministers from the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, a group of more than 80 nations, met virtually on March 30 to address what they said was increased activity in areas once controlled by the group’s fighters.

“The threat remains,” the ministers said in a statement.

But as the Islamic State tries to claw back in the Middle East, it has turned to new footholds in Africa where anger against corrupt governments and ill-equipped local security forces have given rise to armed groups, according to analysts.

Across the Sahel region, stretching from Senegal to Sudan, armed groups have pushed into areas previously untouched by extremist violence. Along the Indian Ocean coastline in Somalia, Al Qaeda-linked militants have established control over large sections of rural areas. And farther south in Mozambique, an insurgency with just a few dozen fighters three years ago has escalated into full-fledged war.

“None of these groups are extraordinarily powerful, it’s just that they have enough capacity to destabilize these fragile states which are not able to maintain a security presence,” said Joseph T. Siegle, director of research at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies.

The Islamic State has forged ties with many of these local insurgencies in what analysts have described as a marriage of convenience: For the militants, the Islamic State brand brings legitimacy and recognition from local governments that the homegrown guerrilla movements have long craved. The Islamic State, in turn, has been able to broadcast the local militants’ attacks as proof that their global jihad is alive and well.

The number of attacks that the Islamic State claimed credit for in Africa grew by more than a third between 2019 and 2020, according to U.S. and other Western counterterrorism officials.

“Right now one of the principal dividends — if not the main benefit — is perception, the ability of ISIS to say, ‘Yes, we’ve lost our territory in Iraq and Syria, but look at us expanding in Africa,’” said Charlie Winter, co-founder of the conflict tracking system ExTrac.

In some places like northeast Nigeria, the Islamic State exerts influence over its local affiliate, the Islamic State in West Africa, and has provided it with trainers and financing, according to the International Crisis Group. But researchers say the Islamic State maintains much looser ties to other militant groups like the insurgency in Mozambique, which remains a largely homegrown movement born of local grievances.

For decades there, impoverished locals watched as elites in the capital plundered the resource-rich region of Cabo Delgado, along the Indian Ocean, which has served as a hub for illegal timber as well as drug and ivory smuggling.

Then in 2009, one of the world’s largest known ruby deposits was discovered in the province, and two years later, oil companies uncovered a natural gas deposit worth tens of billions of dollars. Speculators flocked to the area, locals were forced off their land and some small-scale miners were beaten and killed.

By the time the nascent insurgency launched its first attacks in 2017, targeting police stations and local government leaders, it had widespread appeal among petty traders at the ports and disenchanted youths, local researchers say.

The violent crackdown from the Mozambican military, which was implicated in serious abuses against civilians, may have also helped the insurgency gain more traction with locals.

But over the past year, the nature of the war has changed. The militant group has destroyed entire towns, displacing 670,000 people, killing at least 2,000 civilians and kidnapping scores of others, monitoring organizations say.

“People in Cabo Delgado have come to realize this group is not a solution, it’s destroying the local economy and it’s become very, very violent with the population,” said João Feijó, a researcher at the Observatory of Rural Areas, a Mozambican research institute. “Nowadays the group is pretty isolated.”

Since the insurgency pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in 2019, the conflict has also garnered international attention. Last month, the United States formally designated the group as a global terrorist entity and imposed sanctions on its leader, identified by American officials as Abu Yasir Hassan.

American officials also sent a dozen Army Green Berets to train Mozambican marines for the next two months. Portuguese officials said they would soon send 60 troops to Mozambique, a former colony. A Mozambican military official declared on Sunday that insurgents had been flushed out of Palma.

But hundreds of thousands of displaced people from Cabo Delgado are living in limbo, relying on the hospitality and humanitarian aid to survive. Others who migrated to the province for jobs related to the huge gas project have returned home after international energy companies suspended operations.

“We were afraid of the situation there, but there was work and we have families we need to feed,” said Mr. Dário.

After fleeing last month’s attack, he hid in the bush with dozens of people for days — surviving on raw maize and water from a marsh — before a boat evacuated them to Pemba, a town 155 miles south. Mr. Dário plans to return home to Beira, a city in the south, and find work to support his wife and five children.

“I saw old people, young people, children dying, pregnant women suffering. Even if there is no job for me at home, I would rather stay there with my family,” Mr. Dário said. “But go back to Cabo Delgado, to Palma, never.”

At least three police officers and four members of a government-backed civilian militia were killed while on patrol in eastern Burkina Faso on Monday, government and security sources said on Tuesday.

The victims were ambushed in the town of Tanwalbougou, in Gourma province, said the sources, requesting anonymity because the are not authorised to speak publicly. The sources said that the death toll could increase.

The four civilian fighters killed in were members of the Homeland Defence Volunteers (VDP), a group that receives funds and training from the government to help contain an Islamist insurgency.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack. Attacks by insurgents linked to Al Qaeda and Islamic State are frequent in Burkina Faso as well as in neighbouring Mali and Niger, where insurgents have expanded their reach and attacks in recent years.

In neighbouring Mali, the army said in a separate statement that it had killed 12 jihadists in the central Mopti region on Tuesday morning and that one soldier had died in the fight.

The Tuesday attack is the fourth by insurgents on Malian forces and United Nations peacekeepers since Friday.

More than 40 jihadists, including a senior commander, were killed last week after they attacked United Nations peacekeepers in northern Mali, the UN force MINUSMA said on Monday, according to news.yahoo.com.

A UN source previously said about 20 of around 100 assailants were killed in a three-hour counter-attack after they raided a camp of Chadian peacekeepers, leaving four troops dead.

But on Monday, MINUSMA chief Mahamat Saleh Annadif said a search of the battlefield on Sunday and Monday showed that the death toll among the attackers was roughly twice this number.

“As of today, we have counted more than 40 dead terrorists, including a right-hand man to Iyad Ag Ghaly, by the name of Abdallaye Ag Albaka,” Annadif told AFP.

Ag Ghaly, a veteran jihadist, is leader of the shadowy Group to Support Islam and Muslims (GSIM) in the Sahel, affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

Ag Albaka, a former mayor of the town of Tessalit, has long had a reputation for being one of Ag Ghaly’s lieutenants, entrusted with a senior military role in northern Mali, the cradle of an insurgency in 2012 that has since spread to Niger and Burkina Faso.

A UN security source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Ag Albaka was No. 3 in the GSIM organisation.

The attack targeted a Chadian contingent of MINUSMA at Aguelhok in northern Mali, around 200 kilometres (120 miles) from the border with Algeria.

The dawn raid was carried out by a mobile force on motorbikes and in vehicles.

“The peacekeepers have inflicted a serious setback on the terrorists, that’s for sure, even though we are mourning the death of four” peacekeepers, said Annadif, who is also the secretary general’s special representative for Mali.

Four jihadists were captured on Friday and handed over to Malian forces, the security source said.

The UN also said 34 of its troops had been injured. The number of wounded was previously put at 19.

MINUSMA, whose deployment to Mali began in 2013, is a 15,000-person mission, of which 12,000 are troops.

It has lost more than 140 members to hostile acts, the highest death toll of any UN peacekeeping mission. Ten fatalities have occurred this year alone.

The force has been criticised in some quarters for failing to respond aggressively to the insurgency.

At least 11 members of the Boko Haram terrorist group were killed in an operation conducted Monday in northeastern Nigeria, like reported by aa.com.tr.

Many other terrorists were wounded and weapons, motorcycles and ammunition were seized during the operation carried out by the army in the Gwoza local government area of Borno state, according to a military official who asked not to be named due to security reasons.

Boko Haram launched a bloody insurgency in 2009 in northeastern Nigeria but later spread its atrocities to neighboring Niger, Chad and Cameroon, prompting a military response.

More than 30,000 people have been killed and nearly 3 million displaced in a decade of Boko Haram’s terrorist activities in Nigeria, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Violence committed by Boko Haram has affected some 26 million people in the Lake Chad region and displaced 2.6 million others, according to the UN Refugee Agency.

With more than a week of fierce fighting including beheaded bodies in the streets, the battle for the northern Mozambique town of Palma has highlighted the southern Africa country’s insurgency and threats to its multibillion-dollar investments. Here’s a look at what is known about the rebel group and the challenges facing Mozambique, like reported by federalnewsnetwork.com.

WHO ARE THE REBELS?

They’re mostly unemployed young Muslim men from Cabo Delgado, the northernmost province on the country’s long Indian Ocean coastline.

For centuries, most people there have been Muslims who traded with Swahili dhow sailors and coexisted with Catholicism brought by Portuguese colonial rulers.

Despite rich natural resources, the province has been one of Mozambique’s least developed, with low levels of education, health services, and nutrition.

In recent years some unemployed youths have studied abroad on scholarships from Muslim organizations and locals say many returned preaching a more radical form of Islam. In 2017, violence erupted against government targets by a few small bands, often using machetes to kill police and officials.

The rebels have grown to several hundred, they use motorcycles and are now well-armed with automatic weapons and mortars. Military experts say many weapons come from abroad.

WHAT ARE THEY CALLED?

They are known locally as al-Shabab — Arabic for “youth” — but it seems to be just a handy nickname as they don’t have any known affiliation with Somalia’s jihadi rebels of the same name.

For a few years, the insurgents didn’t appear to be linked to any group, but in 2019, the Islamic State group began claiming responsibility for their attacks, calling them the Islamic State Central African Province.

IS also posts photos and videos of the militants, often standing by the group’s black flag. A video posted this week showed them dressed in a mix of camouflage and black shirts and red scarves, and speaking Swahili and some Arabic.

ARE THEY GAINING GROUND?

The number of attacks since 2017 has risen to more than 838, and more than 500 of those have been in the past year, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project.

More than 2,600 people have been killed. The humanitarian crisis has also dramatically increased, from 90,000 displaced at the start of 2020 to more than 670,000 now, according to U.N. organizations. More than 900,000 people in the area need food aid, according to the World Food Program.

After years of hit-and-run attacks, the rebels captured the port town of Mocimboa da Praia in August and have held it since then. They’ve attacked smaller towns in the surrounding area.

In one massacre, they beheaded 50 people on a soccer pitch, according to a report confirmed by the Catholic bishop of Pemba, the provincial capital, where hundreds of thousands have fled. The rebels target government offices, kill local officials and rob banks.

HOW IS THE GOVERNMENT RESPONDING?

President Filipe Nyusi’s government in Maputo, in the southernmost part of Mozambique, has launched a counterterrorism offensive by the national police and the military.

It also has used a private military organization based in South Africa, the Dyck Advisory Group, which has sent helicopter gunships and other aircraft to find and attack the rebels.

Because the rebels often mingle with civilians, military action is difficult. Atrocities have been committed by all sides — the rebels, the government forces and the mercenaries — according to a March 2 report by Amnesty International. The government and the Dyck group deny the charges, saying they are investigating them.

IS MOZAMBIQUE GETTING HELP?

The United States last month declared Mozambique’s rebels to be a terror organization and sent special operations forces officers to carry out a two-month training of Mozambique’s marines.

Portugal said it’s sending 60 officers to provide training and said the European Union is considering military support.

Mozambique is a member of the 16-nation Southern African Development Community, which has been closely watching the instability. The group has had a few meetings on the rebels but Mozambique hasn’t yet requested direct military help from neighboring countries, including South Africa and Zimbabwe.

WHAT IS THE ECONOMIC IMPACT?

Rebel violence had caused a suspension of work by the French oil and gas firm Total in January.

On March 24, Total said security had improved enough to allow it to resume, but within a few hours, the rebels attacked Palma, and Total once again evacuated workers from the fortified construction site.

Experts say it will be a long time before stability is sufficiently restored for Total to get back to work. The huge deposits of natural gas are reported to be among the world’s largest, and the government was hoping the projects would bring much-needed economic growth.

Exxon also was planning an investment, but that appears to be on hold.

“The whole gas gamble was bet on a promise of security, and Nyusi — and Mozambique — lost the bet,” wrote academic Joseph Hanlon in the newsletter Mozambique News Reports and Clippings.

WHAT IS THE OUTLOOK FOR MOZAMBIQUE AND AFRICA?

The rebels have grown in size and organization. Once viewed as a ragtag bunch of dissatisfied youths, their attacks are more strategic and they are spreading their reach over a large part of northern Cabo Delgado.

Military experts say restoring stability will be a long, violent and challenging process. A more long-range solution would be to improve local governments and provide better services and living conditions, according to analysts and military experts.

But that will be difficult, with the rebels already entrenched. Africa’s arc of extremism — from the Sahel region in West Africa, to Nigeria’s Boko Haram insurgency in central Africa and al-Shabab’s entrenched conflict in Somalia in East Africa — has a new foothold in southern Africa in Mozambique that will be hard to dislodge.

Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) militia fighters have killed 23 people in yet another massacre in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a senior local official has said.

Fighters attacked Beu Manyama-Moliso village in the Beni region late on Tuesday night, North Kivu provincial Governor Carly Nzanzu Kasivita told the AFP news agency.

The army intervened, killing two assailants, he said.

The death toll was still provisional as the search for bodies continued, the governor’s office said on Twitter on Wednesday.

“We are in mourning, the ADF carried out a raid and killed more than 20 people,” said Noella Katongerwaki Muliwavyo, president of an association of grassroots groups in Beni.

Beu Manyama-Moliso is a small village located in remote forests in the Beni region, close to the boundary with Ituri province.

The ADF, which originated in the 1990s in western Uganda with the aim of establishing an Islamic state, is one of more than 100 rebel groups that plague the eastern provinces of the vast country.

About a year ago, the Congolese army launched a large-scale campaign against the ADF.

The ADF is linked to the ISIL (ISIS) group, the United States said earlier this month. United Nations experts, however, have not found evidence of any direct relationship between the two groups.

According to the Kivu Security Tracker, an NGO that monitors violence in the DRC’s troubled east, the group has killed more than 1,200 civilians in the Beni area alone since 2017.

On March 19, the UN said a surge of ADF attacks since the start of the year had killed nearly 200 people and forced 40,000 to flee their homes.

At least 17 were killed in separate attacks on March 23.

Last year, the UN said the group’s attacks could constitute crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The ADF makes money through wood trafficking and DRC officials suspect some military personnel are complicit in its violent raids.

ISIS is “growing stronger” through its use of the illegal ivory and illicit sugar trades to fund terrorists in East Africa, according to a new report by a former British ambassador. Extremist fighters and terror campaigns are being paid for through the unlawful activities which are becoming “more sophisticated”, said Sir Ivor Roberts, a former British diplomat in Lebanon and head of counter-terrorism in the Foreign Office, like reported by thenationalnews.com.

He makes these claims in his report An Unholy Alliance: Links Between Extremism and Illicit Trade in East Africa, produced for non-government organisation the Counter Extremism Project.

He warns that East Africa is being “critically undermined” by the illegal trade, as terror groups continue to thrive.

Mr Roberts’ report was published as ministers from the Global Coalition against ISIS on Tuesday warned of the “urgent threat” posed by growing insurgency in parts of Africa.

Last year, attacks by ISIS in Africa grew by a third.

“The most effective way for the East African region, and the wider international community, to fight extremism, crime, and corruption is to turn off the taps of illicit trade,” Mr Roberts said.

“This can ensure critical revenues are not lost to the shadow economy but are instead invested in key services.

“Combating illicit trade should be the number one priority for East African governments and their international allies. This issue goes beyond the borders of East Africa, and it is imperative that the international community pay heed.”

In recent years, East Africa’s developed transport infrastructure and increasingly affluent consumer markets have seen the region become a prime target for illicit trade networks, Mr Roberts said.

“As illicit trade networks continue to expand and mature in their sophistication, the cost to East African society has been enormous.
“At every link in the illicit chain, economic, social, and political harm is done to East African society, while terror and crime groups grow stronger,” he said.

His report warns that extremist groups such as Al Shabab and Ahlus Sunnah wal Jamaah are exploiting and causing “huge damage” to precarious populations of elephant, rhino and pangolin.

“Illegal wildlife trafficking has continued during the pandemic, despite increasing international awareness of the threat posed by zoonotic diseases which may originate in the illicit transfer of animal products,” he said.

“Ongoing conflicts in central African nations, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Central African Republic, are fuelled by the illegal expropriation and smuggling of environmental resources, including diamonds and wildlife.

“These illicit goods are commonly routed through East Africa on their way to international markets.

“Illicit trade is the lifeblood which sustains extremist groups operating in East Africa and its surrounding regions, including Al Shabab, ISIS and the Janjaweed to the north, the Lord’s Resistance Army and dozens more rebel militias in Central Africa, and the ISIS-linked Ahlus Sunnah wal Jamaah in northern Mozambique.

“There is a great need for co-ordinated action against illicit trade across the whole East African region. It is not enough for individual countries to take isolated measures targeting only specific categories of illicit trade.”

The report makes several recommendations. These include: treating crime, corruption, extremism and illicit trade as “equal evils threatening national security”; adopting anti-illicit trade strategies and enlisting international support; and introducing surveillance tools to enforce manufacturing and market regulations to prevent the production and circulation of illicit products.

“It is evident that crime, corruption, extremism and illicit trade are inextricably linked in East Africa,” he said.

“Therefore, to combat the extremist, criminal and corrupt dangers facing the region it is imperative that national governments and appropriate regional bodies adopt an approach which treats illicit trade as an equivalent security threat. Illicit trade, extremism, crime and corruption must be seen as a composite whole.”

On Tuesday, British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said a “comprehensive and collective effort remains necessary to achieve a full and enduring defeat of ISIS worldwide”.

“Two years on from the territorial defeat of Daesh and liberation of nearly eight million people from its cruel grip, we remain committed to preventing its resurgence,” Mr Raab said.

“The UK is supporting partner forces confronting Daesh in Iraq and Syria, stabilising liberated communities, building institutions so that terrorists face justice and leading efforts against its twisted propaganda.”

Last week ISIS-linked extremists carried out a five-day assault on people living next to a $20 billion site for a major gas energy project, led by the French company Total, in Mozambique.

It led to thousands of people being rescued by a flotilla of fishing vessels, after taking refuge on nearby beaches.